ADN

I came across this article by chance, but I decided to share it out of necessity. Although I never had much use in burning or ripping CDs, DVDs, and the ilk, I still occasionally like to keep my burner practicing its role. So, I've gotten accustomed to using the default XP CD Writing Wizard, even though it only burns an image correctly about 65% of the time. It also takes up up to 180 MB of my Blank CD's initial 700 MB; that's huge! Egregious, no doubt. So, today, I sought some alternatives that others might find as useful as one like I (a total novice) did.

Tell me your preferences for CD/DVD burning programs, which you would recommend, and if you've tried any of the ones mentioned in the article below.

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[iframe]http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/04/28 ... r-windows/[/iframe]

Windows CD burning is probably best avoided because it is a bit dodgy as you've discovered. Plus, it doesn't verify disks so if the disk is bad, your data gets lost and you don't know until later.

The reason you loose some of your CD 700mb space is probably because you are writing files a bit at a time rather than dumping 700mb to the disk in one go. Creating multiple "sessions" on the disk wastes space.

Infrarecorder isn't bad. Personally I use an old version of Nero before it became bloatware.

Unless you need CDs though for the car or something else, you are probably better off saving time getting a hard drive to backup to. Optical media is kind of slow and 5 years down the track, many of my CDs can't be read anymore because the disks have gone bad. I've given up on DVD+/-R too.

How do disks "go bad" :?:

I'm currently backing up my data little by little to an online storage site, with a bit of "physical" storage on CDs here and there, until I get back stateside and buy a good external HD.

Also, for whatever reason, I don't know which type of writable DVD my laptop recognizes. I've bought both DVD +/- and a couple different brands, but I still don't know why my burner doesn't register the blank DVD's storage.

Besides my above questions/comments, your post really provided me with some insight I didn't have before. Thanks, zaphodz.

How do disks go bad? Wikipedia has a good bit on the technology behind disks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R

In summary, data is written to the disk in a layer of dye - the laser kind of burns it or changes it's reflectivity a bit - making the 1's and 0's of your data.

The dye layer doesn't live forever. It degrades with time. So you lose your data.

As an example, I've been playing quite a lot of Quake Live lately and I went to get my old Quake III backup out of my cupboard to install - just for fun. Couldn't read the disk. Analysing it in Nero showed tons of errors. Basically unreadable and worse - you can't get the data off it - ever.

So optical storage (CD/DVD) is time consuming and useless in my opinion. The only way to go is hard disk.

You might want to be somewhat careful about what data you upload to online storage. You are trusting your data to someone else. How can you be sure of your data's safety? If you are uploading personal information, encrypt it (google truecrypt). But seriously, ditch online storage and do it yourself - hard disk. Hard disk is easy to backup, encrypt.

Can your laptop actually burn dvds? Some drives are marketed in a dodgy fashion. They may be able to play dvds and can burn cds but can't burn dvds.

Check what kind of drive it is and google it to see if it supports dvd burning. If your aren't sure, tell me the name/number of it and I'll check for you.

Also, some older drives don't support dvd+r burning. Years ago dvd burning was a circus. Recent laptop drives are expected to support all types of dvd-/+r.

This is great info guys...I recently dropped Nero from my programs list, I'll probably be picking up one of these...

Really? I still use and love nero....

Just not worth the 500 or more MB of space it was taking up, when the program that I use now takes up about 85...There were some really good apps there, but nothing that I don't think I could get w/some lightweight freeware...Plus, I forgot to mention that I'm trying to stop pirating, lol...

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

Next your going to tell me your stopping photo copyright infringement too..... :D

The funny thing is that Nero in its current form isn't even worth pirating. They've bloated it out by throwing in the kitchen sink.

I have an old version - 6.6.1.4. It works fine. Burns, verifies and tests all disks. If I want to rip or encode, I certainly wouldn't use Nero for that.